being friendly towards customers

16 Jul 2008

I just a read a very interesting post on how to gain market share,
and what prompted me to post is the following snippet which states the
advantages of being friendly towards customers:

...It reminds me of independent booksellers, who said "why should I
make it comfortable for people to read books in my store? I want
them to buy the books!" And then one day Barnes and Nobles puts
couches and cafes in the stores and practically begged people
to read books in their store without buying them. Now you've got all
these customers sitting in their stores for hours at a time,
mittengrabben all the books with their filthy hands, and the
probability that they find something they want to buy is linearly
proportional to the amount of time they spend in the store, and even
the dinkiest Barnes and Nobles superstore in Iowa City rakes in
hundreds of dollars a minute while the independent booksellers are
going out of business. Honey, Shakespeare and Company on Manhattan's
Upper West Side did not close because Barnes and Nobles had
cheaper prices, it closed because Barnes and Nobles had more human
beings in the building.

I used to frequent some local book/magazine franchise whose merchandise
I liked but just couldn't afford.
That made the experience uncomfortable, the risk of being told to leave.